Podcast analytics and attribution company Chartable has plunged into the expanding pool of lists, announcing today the Chartable Top 200. The company is headlining the new product as “The podcast industry’s first global, weekly rankings.”
It is actually two lists: Global Top 200 Podcasts, and Global Trending Podcasts. Here they are.
In an email exchange with RAIN News, Chartable Co-founder and CEO Dave Zohrob said that about 5,000 podcasts were in Chartable’s analytics system, which is required to land on a list. Zohrob noted that today’s announcement is bringing in a slew of new sign-ups for the measurement service, which is free with a self-serve sign-up that offers detailed instructions by hosting platform. (Producers and publishers can go here to get started.)
The benefit of multiple lists
The Chartable Top 200 joins rankers from Podtrac, Triton Digital, Edison Research, Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Stitcher, and other, each with its own focus and methodology. There is startling variety when looking across these charts. Consider Apple and Spotify, the two largest podcast distributors. The top five podcasts (U.S., all categories) of those two lists are completely unduplicated. Anyone curious could discover 10 worthwhile shows by look at the top five of each. One difference is carriage — Spotify, for example, does not carr The Joe Rogan Experience, a glaring absence of a show which appears in the top five just about everywhere.
So Chartable has a lot of upside with its 5,000 podcasts out of the total inventory of 900,000-plus programs in Apple. But what really matters for any list which requires being tracked by the list creator (like Chartable, Podtrac, and Triton Digital) is getting well stocked with the most successful shows. Joe Rogan, widely regarded as residing at the top of the entire heap, does not seem to care about being listed, or included in various analytics systems. But this might be a good thing for podcast discovery, as the Joe Rogan hole can be filled by another worthy show eager to be discovered.
How the trending list works
We asked Dave Zohrob how the Global Trending Podcasts list works. “We’re still tweaking the details,” he told us, “but it’s based on weekly growth in reach relative to audience size. We define “reach” as the number of unique IP+User-Agent combinations (same definition as an IAB “Listener”). There are some more wonky details [and] we’ll be continually updating the algorithm.”
“We think the industry needs more, transparent public data, updated more frequently,” Zohrob noted. “That’s why we’re updating once per week and breaking down shows by genre and country and offering a Trending chart. We hope that more publishers will join the charts over time, and that advertisers find the chart helpful for planning and making their buys. And we’re always open to feedback!”